Episode 07: Isthmus be my lucky day

Cambridge off Seawan is a weirding Way media podcast The make up Hello and Welcome to I almost said Wake Up Heavy, Hello and Welcome to Cambridge and was Sean a podcast by two weird guys about the weird things that they like. I am Mark Bigley, who also hosts Wake Up Heavy recollections of horror and with me as always is Ronnie Zeriggie and otherwise known as Skelevator on YouTube. Decided to be or We got a lot of fun things to talk about. You got anything from last time to fix or add too? Before we start?

No, as I do. The last episode was epic. Man, I'm sure there are little things, but when I was listening to it again, I didn't catch anything. Yeah, I caught most of it and did my fixes in the episode, I realized I left out a couple of things. Oh yeah, one of them being a correction from earlier in this show.

And I don't remember which episode we talked about Sam which shops, but I, for some reasons said that the packing shit had been on Peach and to Larry, which I know is not right because that's where Easterby is. It's on Peach and Kings Canyon. Kings Canyon again, that long strip of Kings Canyon is going to show up quite a bit in our conversations, I think, so I goofed on that, and then I mentioned the Freakis in the Burbs. Yeah, and I knew this, but they had brought it back in the mid to late eighties. That kind of changed.

It changed most of their names and made them aliens as opposed to I guess just a little monsters or whatever they're supposed to be. And so that's most likely why it was in the Burbs. It wasn't like they found a thirteen year old box of it or something. It had been reissued pretty recently. Oh that.

I don't know why I'm correcting this, but the Bob's Big Boy popsy thing that I got from Funko, you can't record a message. It just has it's got a little button on it and it pops up this bubble thought bubble or that has a phrase like you're awesome or something like that. That's cool. I rereread the description. I'm like, how did I get that from that?

Either way, that's cool. Yeah, it's pretty cute. The cause contest actually ended on December first, December second, like I said a couple of times in the show. I think I got my notification on the second. So one addition to the discussion on Hostess.

Yes, this hadn't really come to mind. I just remember finding that image that I sent you that has all of the icons, and I mentioned Zingers on the episode because we still get those pretty regularly, especially the raspberry coconut ones, and I always love those as a kid. And I'm like, wait a minute, did they have an icon for Zingers. I don't remember seeing at in any of the old vintage stuff that I looked at, and so I looked up vintage Zinger packaging and went, oh, yeah, they weren't even Hostess back then. They were Dolly Madison and the Peanuts characters were their icons.

Oh shoot, that's crazy. Thank you for reminding me of that. I'd forgotten about that. I don't know when that change happened. I don't know when they got snatched up by Hostess or what.

I mean. We ate them when I was a kid and only remember them as being Hostess snat cake, right. It must have happened, maybe early in the seventies or something. But I also do remember seeing Peanuts iconography along with them. So that's cool.

I found that interesting that they were missing from all the hostess stuff. Yeah, that's crazy. I wonder would you want your characters to be associated with sugary snack cakes? Maybe Charles Schultz, do you think do you think he was happy with that game randed than the license? So that should have been too bothered by it.

Got the check paid off his mortgage. I did think of two addendums just now as you were talking. There is a new Serial Monster character just announced. I saw that, and she is like a zombie or something. That's a new female character.

It's cool that they're adding a female character. I have mixed feelings about it because she could be a zombie, she could be a Frankenstein monster. It's hard to tell what exactly she is. She feels like an outlier. I'm surprised I didn't go with like Bride of Frankenstein or something like that.

She feels like slightly anomalous. Yeah. I saw the posts on that and I was like, Oh, they're hitting the Monster high crowd with this. Oh yeah, it looks very monster high. Yes, you're absolute thank you that, you're absolutely right.

Maybe that's what this is about. Yeah, they want to tap into that market. I can see that now. That makes a lot of sense. It's just fine.

And they're bringing back the monster mash cereal, which just bears no appeal to me whatsoever. All the cereals mixed together just sounds disgusting. No, the box art might be awesome though, well, and they've gone back to that very angular, pointy, modern aesthetic for all of them, including the new character, and I don't care for it. I mean, I'll still buy account chocolate when it hits the shelves. Oh and another thing I found funny is how often we say that we're not heavy funco collectors.

And we sure mentioned them last episode. I know we always want to say they're just like filler, they serve as filler. But I picked up a funko the other day. It was Colin Robinson from What We Do in the Shadows, who's like, he's my favorite character because he's an energy vampire. Yeah, that guy's great.

We all know energy vampires. Yes, I feel like I'm an energy vampire sometimes, So I really I love Colin Robinson. I couldn't resist. And so sometimes that's the only place where you can find a character that you enjoy. So yeah, got to commend Funco Pops for that.

Yeah, they really attack every license possible. Yeah, it makes sense. Of course, they're dumping thirty million dollars worth of stuff in a landfill so they can write it all off. They really should build like a Funco Pop island out of melted Funco pops or something and put them to use build a building or something. Then you don't get a tax break.

Ronnie, dang it all right. My other addendum is it's Grimace's birthday coming up tomorrow as of this recording. Oh my gosh, that's right tomorrow. It's really weird. This is going to come up later on in today's episode a little bit.

It's that same thing where you throw something out into ether, you start obsessing on it and you don't really know why, and then suddenly it pops up in our collective consciousness, like it becomes a thing again. Yeah, the zeitgeist. And I feel like, after our episode where we talked about the McDonald land characters, we've had a Hamburglar return and now Grimis is returning, and I kind of love that I get sucked into the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and stuff. Sometimes I don't adhere to them, but they're super fascinating to me. And that one theory that we are in a created world as opposed to simulation.

Yeah, simulation as opposed to everything being natural. When we have those instances, that's when I'm like, man, I do feel like they're not just they are not just listening to the phones, but they're also just listening to our thoughts, which is crazy to me. It's exciting. And I've looked into the T shirts. They're not going to be available to us, only to people who work at McDonald's.

They're really cool Happy Birthday Grimma's t shirts. I might have to just find one on eBay and get it that way. You could try and butter up. But an employee at one by fashion Fair, I mean the one by it is by fashion Fair, but one by Frozen State go in there and slip somebody twenty bucks. Yeah, I might wander in there and do that.

I'll have to see if I can find the best deal, and I'll pick you one up too. Hey, Johnny, getting give me one of them shirts, like a Chris twenty dollars here for You're like the tenth guy that's asked me that. I know. It's so funny too, because I will with things like that, I am pretty like shameless. I will walk into the place and be like, hey, there's no harm in asking, no harm in asking, and better to get information than imagine that the information is unavailable to you.

Yes, don't be rate a McDonald's employee who's not making enough money to deal with your shit. But you know it doesn't hurt to ask. Yeah, you guys still a mose Grimmace shirts. I really try to not be an asshole, you know. I try to go in there and be as friendly as possible.

Maybe buy a thing just to show, Like, if I going to Target looking for joy the Grimmace meal that they're going to be releasing, Oh heck yeah, wild BlackBerry shake or whatever it is. Yeah, purple shake, purple milkshake. I'm definitely going to try that. I gotta try it. Gets some nuggets, gonna shake.

I know you're gonna get the big mac. Yeah. I probably won't be going unless there's something that goes with it. Yeah. Have you seen a Hamburglar commercial though?

Since he's been bad? Okay, I've only seen print not print dads, but a picture of a billboard and just stuff online, just marketing on social media. They were showing up on Hulu. Oh, the Hamburglar commercials there. They haven't been popping up lately.

That phase is past. The billboards still up on Highway ninety nine when I'm driving into work, And yeah, I did catch some those commercials. There were like three different ones. I think I'll have to look him up on YouTube then, because I haven't seen any. And I think the actor who was the headmaster at the Rushmore School in Rushmore, he's also in succession.

And yeah, Brian Cox, Brian Cox, Yeah, thank you. I don't always blanking up. I think he's narrating those. He narrates most McDonald's commercials. Oh, doing it for years.

No, wonder well. I was like, that's great that they got him to narrate this. I thought it was just for the Hamburger. No, he's been doing it for years. Good for Yeah, that's odd.

The first time I heard that, I'm like, I mean, and like I said, this was years ago, because that Brian Cox. But that's a weird choice. I mean, hey, like Michael Caine says, you know, he's never seen Jaws for but he's seen the house at at Boughton. It's beautiful. There, there you go.

And Brian Cox is a smart choice. If you want somebody's voice to really like bring you in, he's got a great one. He does have a great voice. It's just odd though, that this very I believe he's Scottish, yeah, actor is doing Shakespearean actor basically, yeah, and he's doing his American accent for these McDonald's. It's odd.

I feel like someone has a sense of humor on the McDonald's team. Alrighty, let's dive into this, dude. All right, let's get into it. What's your first obsession for Cambridge m Sean episode seven? All right, so this first one.

Both of the obsessions that I picked today stem from the same place, but the first one I get to share a lot of embarrassing facts about myself. So buckle up, buckle in, buckle up, either one, either one? All right? So the first choice is Charlie Chaplin. When I was little, my aunt's best friend and roommate used to record oh gosh, what was it called Nick at Night?

Nick at Knight. We didn't have cable, but she did and she would record the Nick at Knight old timey comedy film stars. They would show three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy Mark's brothers, silent greats like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle and all kinds of crazy stuff they would show. I believe it was Nick at Knight before they started doing like music and stuff that I'd watched later on in high school. But she would record those things.

I think they did music. They had like a Nickelodeon. Oh maybe it's Nickelodeon. Well, that's what Nick at Knight is is Nickelodeon's They had a late night in high school, they had like a late night alternative music video hour. I don't remember what it was called, but that's how I first was introduced to the Pixies and Nirvana and Sonic Youth and Suicidal Tendencies and all kinds of great bands.

Anyways, previous to that, they used to show like late night silent and old timey stuff. I got really into old timey comedy radio. So this is sort of the same intro for my next one, but I'll jump into Charlie Chaplin now, speaking of the zeitgeist, speaking of like an odd cultural phenomenon that occurred in the early nineties. I had sort of paused. I got into horror films and sci fi films and stuff.

So I stopped my old timey comedy movie obsession and went into that stuff. And then it started to come back around ninety one. Maybe I saw a poster or something like that. But when the Chaplin movie came out in ninety two, it was almost like they were reading my mind. They again, here we get into the embarrassing stuff.

I started to collect silent film shorts on vhs. They were starting to come out, they were starting to hit stores. I would pick up one when I could. By then I had my first job, which was at McDonald's and painting holiday windows, so I could set aside money and go and get these things. And I started collecting them and collecting them, and then I feel like the announcement came for the Chaplin movie with Robert Downey Jr.

I went off the rails a little bit. My freshman year of high school, it was all about Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Every chance I'd get to go to an antique store and get old timey looking things, I would. I had like a little old timey briefcase and I found a Derby and a crushed top hat and oh yeah, it was really cool. I probably got mercury poisoning, which is explains a lot of the slowing of my, my, my, my beachs.

There you go. Okay, so this is the embarrassing part. I would wear this stuff my freshman year of high school. I'd wear suspenders, I would wear the hat. And I had found a we brought up Valley Novelty before.

I found a bamboo cane at Valley Novelty. And then the movie came out and it just fueled the fire. I was like deep into it. Soon after that, in nineteen ninety three, this movie Benny and June came out with Johnny Depp. Yea Johnny Depp was embodying Buster Keaton and a little bit of Chaplin too.

I think there's even like a he does the role thing, the dancing of the bread rolls. It's not a bad movie. Actually. I like Benny and June. Not a huge Johnny Depp fan, but there are some movies where it's like awesome and fear and loathing in Las Vegas and Benny and June, Edwood ed Wood, Oh my god, we got to talk about ed Wood future episode.

Thank you for the reminder. I'm writing it down, writing it down right. I also have Young Frankenstein on my list for me, that movie it embodied everything that I was going through at the time as a freshman in high school and early sophomore year of my high school experience. I was deeply obsessed for a span of about two years with Charlie Chaplin. My favorite movie of his were The Shorts and The Kid.

To this day, when I watched The Kid, I get choked up. Man, that's such a masterpiece. I love that stuff. I still to this day get a craving for it. I hear the music he would compose for his later films, and it's just so good.

He was a master of his craft. I don't mean to throw in Buster Keaton here too, but Buster Keaton deserves his own episode for me. I discovered Buster Keaton through Charlie Chaplin, so I'm appreciative of that, because Buster Keaton is a whole other beast so cool. The early nineties for me were about discovering great bands and dressing up like a nineteen eighteen to nineteen twenty five silent film star. I didn't do the Adolf Hitler mustache or anything.

I did wear the hat, I did wear the baggy clothes and took my cane to school. Oh my gosh, I keep thinking about it now. I'm like, what was I doing? See these inspirational posts all the time on Instagram and Twitter, and like, no one remembers the stupid thing you did in high school. But I guarantee you everybody in your class remembers you dressing up like that to this state.

Remember that kid they used to dress up like Charlie Chapman, Yeah, what the fuck was his deal? Oh yeah, I wonder what happened to him. I got called names. I went to high school in the mountains, and already if you go to high school in the middle of nowhere and there's already factions of strong belief systems in place, I don't want to get into details. For me to be dressing like that in a fairly small school with a high population of conservatives, I did get called a lot of names.

I did it to myself. I'm glad I did because it proved to me what I should and should not do, but that ultimately we gotta do what we gotta do. To make ourselves feel good, yes above all, no matter how arrassing it was. And thinking back on it, I've been slowly going through pictures from my mom's photo albums. Maybe there's pictures of this, oh I hope so I haven't run across any pictures.

I'll have to next time I go visitor, I will have to look at the later photo albums high school years. But man, to this day, I have a deep affection for Charlie Chaplin, a deep affection for old timey comedians. I saw Chaplin and the Theater actually, and I think I saw it at the UA that was showing all the art films during that time. Yeah, that's the one I went to. I don't know that it wasn't necessarily included in that hole.

That's something we need to talk about too, is that stretch of time when that UA was basically a repertory cinema on an episode, the one on Blackstone right, Yeah, Yeah, that's where I saw Chaplin for sure. Maybe we were at the same show. Maybe that doesn't top me seeing an Eraserhead the same day in London as Peter Strickland though, so still the article we didn't. Yeah, that's amazing I can just imagine people, like how many people have I sat in movie theaters with and I was unaware of? Yeah, that's why that little tidbit always blows my mind.

That Chaplin movie is pretty good too. I don't think i've seen it since then, to be honest with you, I watched it a lot thirty one years ago. I mean, maybe it doesn't really work in today's climate because Chaplin made a lot of crappy decisions regarding his love interests, being under age and so on and so forth. I don't know if that movie holds up in that regard. But you got to tell the truth, and this guy was deeply flawed, as many of them are.

The One thing that really bugs me about Hollywood movies about flawed famous people is that they have a tendency to romanticize aspects of their flaw. You and I have talked about bar Fly a lot. I think bar Fly succeeds in not romanticizing Bukowski's flaws. It's difficult to I mean pretty much every other Hollywood movie that I've seen hesitandency to do that when it's a biopic like The Doors and Chaplain's one, and don't get me started on that Doors movie. Oh my goodness, it's like there's a whole other I think.

Don't get me startled, ball of blacks. How about you? What's on your list? This kind of ties in with what you're talking about today, And I recognize that when you mentioned what you were going to be talking about when I asked you, and I was like, oh yeah, it's an interesting counterpoint to me because all of those guys that you've mentioned I never got into as a kid or even as an adult. And anytime anybody would talk about loving the Three Stooges and this comes up because of the Evil Dead films and oh yeah, and I think Mike and I even talk about this on that episode of Wickup Heavy as those movies and that original trilogy get more, Three stooge is esque.

Yeah, the less I like them. Yeah, I always point to this as my alternative to those and it's our gang and or the Little Rascals. Yes, yes, maybe. Look that is my old tiny go to for comedy and even some dramedy. You know, if you watch all of them, they get pretty heavy sometimes.

Oh yeah, that's the humor that I like. I've never been a slapstick guy. So the Three Stooges have never appealed to me, and not the Chaplain or Keaton or any of those guys weren't necessarily slapstick, but the Marx Brothers and Three Stooges are the antithesis for me of what the little rascals are. So this was just one of those things that when I was growing up. And I don't know how much this extends into your childhood because you're a bit younger than me.

It was constant. They were on oh yeah, Channel twenty six, which was our Fox affiliate back then when Fox wasn't really a channel, it was a local channel in most markets. This was one of those shows that was on constantly. I can remember watching it on the weekends. I think it was on the Al Radco Show, which will come up in a minute here, part of that Saturday morning chunk of cartoons and stuff, I believe.

But I also remember watching them when I was homesick from school, so they were on in the mornings, but I also remember watching them when I would get home from school. This stuff in syndication, which is still a thing. Back then, it was really a big thing, especially for a TV station like twenty six. Where that's pretty much all they did was get syndicated shows. Oh yeah, I remember watching Al Gang in Little Rascals on Channel twenty six.

For sure. These stations by these packages of films or shorts or cartoons, which is also why you know they would have all those Shaw Brothers Kung Fu movies. It's because you buy this big package of stuff to syndicate. Once you buy that, you can just keep showing it. And boy did they keep showing it.

I watched it religiously. I think that was one of the things, probably from a very young age too. I mean like kindergarten age, if not younger. I would sit and watch Our Gang. It's just funny to me how as a kid you don't really think about when it was made or No.

Yeah, I don't think I had any idea that these and also with cartoons, the same sort of way like Luney tunes, that these were things that were made to show before films. These weren't made for TV. I didn't recognize that. I thought these were old TV shows, you know, in the same vein as I Love Lucy or something, not realizing until decades later. Oh, when you went to a movie, you would see cartoon shorts.

You would see these shorts, you would see all this other stuff, cereals, all this stuff before the movie played. Yeah, they kind of do these days. Sometimes they'll show up one of those Disney or Pixar shorts before a full length Disney movie. You don't go to a theater and sit and watch a twenty minute Our Gang short. These days, you go and get bombarded with ads and stupid trivia that's also add and all this other garbage.

So anyway, I mean, it was constant, but it was also since this was the time before streaming or even VHS or anything, you had to wait until something came back. So the few favorites that I had, I would always hope that they would re show. So that again is another part of the miracles of syndication. And the ones that really stick out for me are Spanky. I think it's just called Spanky, and it was his second appearance in the series.

And this started in nineteen twenty two, so in the silent era. These started hal Roach Studios, who also did Laurel and Hardy and a bunch of other stuff, and a lot of those comedians are in episodes, called them episodes, but are in our gang shorts early on. Spanky appeared in nineteen thirty two, so ten years after they started, and he was like three and a half years old. It's incredible, Yeah, when he started his career. I didn't realize this until doing my little bit of research.

But the one that I love, which I think is just called Spanky, where he goes bug hunting for Hiven's sake, Spy, what on earth are you doing now? Was his second appearance on there. Also, from what I read, they took part of his screen test and kind of smashed it in and made episodes out of it. I watched a little bit of it this morning. You can kind of tell where they did a lot of clever inserts and stuff.

But I was like, hey man, that it works, and god, dude was just a natural, and so I always Spinky was my guy. I loved Baby Spanky. It's on YouTube so in various different forms, but if you just look up like Spinky bug Hunting, or Spinky's first or second appearance, you'll get this little clip of him hunting for a cockroach in his bedroom with one of the pets. I'm not sure which how many pets they had gone through and that's the dog that has like a target eye. Yeah, and then taking a bath.

It's just the most delightful thing in the world. Yeah, they're great. As the story progresses, his brother, I guess, and a bunch of the Argang kids are putting on a performance of a play of some sort. Spinky and his brother's dad has stashed a bunch of money in the house, like hidden all this money, and Spanky finds it and ends up throwing it out of the window, and of course all the kids run to collective blah blah blah. But it's just funny how when I want to express my desire to buy something, I use that meme of him, Oh yeah, checking out the money out of the window with his little Tami shanter on.

Oh yeah, all dulled up. I mean, it's just there. You know, you can buy them. And some of the episode are on to be but it's hard to tell. It doesn't show you which ones are on there, and I kind of just want to see the ones that I remember liking a lot, But that one his second appearance, and then one from I think four or five years later, maybe maybe not that long, but there's one called Mama's little pirate where they hunt for buried treasure.

It involves this giant if you watch that episode, I mean this guy, and of course these are all little kids, but I know they do some stuff with perspective and things as well. And he looks genuinely like ten feet tall in this even when the kids are around him. It was a tall actor, but you know, not ten feet tall or anything. But I just remember having my mind blown by that and knowing well enough that you know, it was made well before I was born and all that stuff. That's one of my favorites.

And then another one that involves Spanky is when he's babysitting, kind of left in charge of another group, a whole bunch of kids. There's one kid that all he says is remarkable. And that's something that has stuck in my brain on you know, almost fifty years. That is remarkable. CONTRUI that remarkable.

Yeah. I love Pete sack amb something that I and this comes up pretty regularly anytime I hear the word isthmus I think of a line from our gang. I say it comes up pretty often because we watch Jeopardy every day in my house and there are a lot of clues that involve an isthmus of one sort or another. So anytime I hear the word isthmus, I either mutter it out loud or say in my head this line from Little Rat. I knew them as Little Rascals when it was syndicated, they were called Little Rascals, yes, but the original short spurt they were introduced as our gang, how roaches, Our gang?

So what's the line? And this is interesting because it's a mystery memory. But oddly enough, I'm not the only person that misremembers it this way. They had a lot of scenes in the school with their teacher, Miss crab Apple, which I'm sure influenced the Simpsons. Right, So I thought it was a scene in the schoolhouse and the teacher asks one of the students, can you use the word isthmus and a sentence?

And he says, So I looked that up and I found the clip and it's not in school. It's one where they're all in an orphanage. It's called Mush and Milk. That's the name of the short, and so they're all at a table and they're getting fed this gross mush and stuff. It's like the headmaster of the orphanage asks the character, uh huh, that's his name because he always says huh.

So he says, uh huh. Can you say a sentence using the word isthmus? And he's like, uh huh, and then he says that line. The other thing that I found when I was looking it up is a post on our gang message board, and the guy was asking, what's the name of the episode in the school where the kids are giving all this misinformation to the questions that are asked, and people are like, no, no, no, no. Those are two separate episodes.

There is one where they're saying the incorrect thing in school, and that's this episode. And then the isthmus line is from Mush and Milk. And I was like, oh, see, interesting because I pictured it very clearly in my head that it was a kid standing up in class saying that line. I love that line. Can you give me a stas with the wood isthmus in it.

That's the other thing about the show. Last episode, I sure did go clip crazy, but oh oh I like that. Actually, in listening to it, I was like, oh, I'm so every time a clip would pop in, I'd be like, oh, I'm so glad Mark put that in there because it helps provide perspective and it's fun. It is fun. It's fun finding them and putting them in.

So, yeah, Alfalfa was my favorite from the show, and he's sort of like a lot of people's favorite. I know that. I just got such a kick out of that kid and funny. My memory of Channel twenty six and those episodes coming on, it was always a Saturday. I feel like they were between the cartoons and action theater, and I feel like there would be an episode of Little Rascals or Arguing, and then also an episode of the Three Stooges.

I kind of learned to like both of those through Channel twenty six as well. I know you had you have mixed feelings about Three Stooges, but yeah, they were there right next to each other in my memory, and I think they used them as filler between things like yeah, if something didn't quite make it, which is still done today on cable channels HBO or something, they'll throw in something in between movies to get to twelve o'clock or one thirty or whatever. So I'm sure they did a lot of that, and I'm sure these were cut to pieces the original I think for the first ten years or so, the shorts were twenty minutes, and then they ended up being ten minutes or so. I'm guessing that a lot of those twenty minute shorts got cut.

Yeah, and which makes sense because there was a lot of filler, and it was a case of you've got all these kids, they're not reading the scripts and going. They did it a different way where they suggested the things to them, and of course in the silent era they could just say now do this, now do that, now do this. Once sound came along, it was more like, give them the basics of the story and let them go so they improvise. Those little kids. Yeah, you mentioned Alfalfa and spanking.

Alfalfa and Darla and Steiny and Buckwheat and Chubby were a lot of my favorites. Froggy was a favorite anytime he showed up. Yes, listening to him talk, I don't have a lot of money and beside it's too hot here. There's a great Steiny scene where he's trying to finagle ham and eggs from a kid. That is one of those things that's burned into my brain.

And he was a very talented kid as well, like spanky and very natural and delivers some lines it just absolutely floor me. I bad. And there's a urban legend of the Curse of the Argang Kids where people think that, you know, they all ended up destitute and drug addicted and suicidal, and there were instances of that. There were, like through the years, and it ran until about forty four, So for twenty something years, they went through a lot of kids, like forty to fifty different kids. So it wasn't always Spanky Buckwheat Leaves at some point, Stimy Leaves at some point.

They went through I don't know how many Pete the pups and yeah, you know, there were some people that went on to big things. Jackie Cooper was one of the original. I think he was before Snaky came around. Jackie Cooper in Superman. When we wrenched Superman for the first time, my dad said, that's the kid from Little Rascals.

I was like, oh my god. Was one of the first times I realized as a youngster, realized how similar someone can look as child as they do as an adult. Yep, was through Jackie Cooper. Yeah, yeah, And I always used to get him confused with the guy that plays mister Olman in the Shining I always thought that was Jackie Cooper. It's another he wasn't one of the Our Gang kids.

He was an actor that had been around for a long time and I forget his name right now. The actor who played mister Ullman was Barry Nelson. Then the other one, of course, is Robert Blake was one of the later Our Gang kids. I think I actually realized that pretty young, and I don't know if it was because of Bretta being on TV around the same time, but I was aware when and I think he was called Nicky in the Our Gang shorts. It's like, God, that kid looks familiar.

We won't get into too much into Robert Blake, but I mean he went in I have a pretty long career. Yeah. And then Butch who And this always confused me until recently, because you know, they would just play these shorts out of order, and the kids would age in front of your eyes or go down in age. You know, Spinky's ten here and he's three and a half hunting bugs here. And early on the actor that played Butch played a character named Tommy.

And when he was Tommy early on, he was like a spoiled, rich kid and always going after the affections of Darla, who Alfalfam liked and would seem for. And then later on he was morphed into a bully and he had a sidekick named Woim so a worm but wim and which always reminds me of the bullies in Christmas Story. And I've told this story on Wake Up Heavy when I was in second grade. Are I think she was? I always thought of her as a teacher's aide, but she might have been a student teacher who was getting her credential and working in our class.

She somehow had an inn with al Ratka and his show that was on every Saturday morning, and so our class ended up going there and performing skits on his show. And his cameraman was Tommy Bond, who played Butch Oh Little Rascals. That's so cool you mentioned that being able to recognize somebody. He looked exactly the same, even wore the old page boy hat. He was chomping on a cigar the whole time we were there.

I think he was pleasant, but having seen him as that character so many times, and just by his face being craggy and cranky looking at just assumed that he was just a mean old guy. I love that. Yeah, weird, And if you look him up on a Wikipedia you know, it mentions that him ending up in Fresno and working for that station. That's so interesting. That's cool, kind of the opposite of you.

The slapstick and the physical comedy of the twenties and thirties has always appealed to me. I haven't returned to episodes at Our Gang or Little Rascals as much as I've returned to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges and Lauren Hardy and all that stuff. But now I really want to go back and watch this episode. I'm ninety five percent sure that if I just randomly pick an episode of Our Gang that it'll bring back memories for me, because those images and scenarios are just burned into my brain. It's delightful.

I mean, just watching that two minute section of the Spinky Thing that I watched this morning just brought me immense joy. Yeah, that's awesome. I bookmarked a couple other things on there. I want to watch the Forgotten Babies short, which is where the kid says remarkable constantly. Yeah, because I think the whole shorts on YouTube and then some of the other ones as well, they're a joy to watch.

And I'm serious, watching that kid hunt bugs and take a bath is so immensely pleasing. Yeah, sounded odd, but you know what I mean. He's just a joy. He's a natural, and it's smartazing. It is remarkable.

That's a good lead into my next one. Unless you have any more to say about I won't get into the whole race thing, but I think as a kid, I'll end on this. It was nice to see white and black kids, yes, play together and figure out problems together. It's kind of funny. In the Wikipedia injury, it says that it was praised for its inclusion, but if you go through the list of episodes, yeah, many of them were either edited or pulled completely from syndication because of racial stereotyping as well as a lot of the instances had to do with portrayals of women in the shorts and all this other stuff.

So look at it from the time they were made the twenties and thirties, mainly in a little bit into the forties, and it wasn't very progressive times. Yeah. Well, the next guy that I'm about to talk about. Definitely a problem in that regard. There are a lot of things like that that we are challenged with the idea of accepting them because of the time in which they existed, of appreciating what else they had these things had to offer.

Inevitably similar to what I was saying about romanticizing Charlie Chaplin's exploits, early episodes of Popeye, some episodes of Laurel and Hardy, definitely some early Looney Tunes, things, early Disney cartoons. There's a reason why they have been either edited over the years or just simply have disappeared. And I get it. I have a problem with that because if you're not able to I mean, let's take Song of the South for an example. Yeah, disappearing something doesn't erase the problem, and it doesn't give people an opportunity to discuss it.

Oh yeah, exactly. We all know it'll never end up on Disney. Plus, I look at TCM, who shows I want to say, Gone with the South, Gone with Gwynn, who shows that a lot, and it's a glamorization of bad time in history. They usually preface it with a discussion on that. Probably most of the our gang stuff that I saw as a kid were the edited versions.

I know that there was still some sticky stuff in there. In regard to Stimy and Buckwheed, I mean Buckwheed early on was dressed as a Pickaninny And Yeah, later on you really couldn't differentiate between them and the other kids based on their looks or their outfits or anything. But there were still jokes made at their expense, and they spoke in a very stereotyped manner a lot of the time, not all the time. Yeah, I'm with you on that. In order to learn how to move forward, if we keep disappearing things from our consciousness or from our culture from the past, those big mistakes, my fear is that we regress and that we don't learn from And there's there's a lot of aspects of our current political climate that makes you feel like we're regressing in some ways.

Absolutely. I wonder is that partially a result of trying so hard to cover up our previous mistakes as opposed to look at them critically. And I do think that that's a problem. Disney, as you mentioned, Song of the South, has been proponent of that issue, especially with that film. They have tried harder these days on Disney Plus, including little disclaimers, yeah, disclaimers at the beginning, saying hey, this is not how we do not support this kind of thing, or just to say this includes yes, exactly, might tobacco use tobacco use racial stereotyping exactly etc.

I think that's important. You know, it's like not this is a very a lighter version of that. But you know, Steven Spielberg when he revised ET, he released the original version of ET along with the revised version of ET. Yeah, and the revised version doesn't really exist anymore. It's gone out.

If you catch it on streaming or anywhere else right now, it is the original version. And that's the way it should be. I mean no, I mean, I'm not going to say that's the way it should be, because every artist should have the opportunity to revise their work. If you do what George Lucas did, which is blasphemous in my opinion, where you just completely remove the original version of your films, that's taken it too far. So get into your next guy, your problematic guy.

Speaking of this guy, he has barely been touched by this problem that we're discussing right now, which is that people going in and adjusting his previous work. It's almost like he's sort of flown under the radar in that way, and I'm kind of glad for it. I watched many of his films when I was going through my early comedy obsession as a kid, and they never really resonated with me, even though I thought he was fascinating. So I'm talking about WC. Fields.

Are You Drinking? I was fascinated by him. I would see his ventriloquist dummy at Arthur's Toys. There was something unique about that guy, even though he just looked like a normal guy. Aside from his red, bulbous nose.

He looked like a guy you could possibly see at the store, aside from his old timy outfits. I didn't realize the brilliance of his comedy style until later on. In fact, I rediscovered him when I was worked at a video store in my late twenties yea twenties, early thirties. I just gobbled him up. It suddenly clipped, and I want to thank Larry David for having the show Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The moment I sat down and rewatched the dentist, or it's a gift, or the golf specialist. I realized that WC. Fields was the first Larry David. He was the first comedian to never get a break, always something going wrong, the world working against him, hating everyone, including kids. That reminded me of something else too.

One of the first gifts I got as a very very young kid, I must have been like four or five or something. I don't know. I'm just gonna say five when I received this as a gift from a family member. I don't know who gave it to me. I don't know why it was given to me as a gift.

There was this book that came out, and it was all of WC. Fields lines where he explains so much he dislikes children. The name of the book was I never met a kid I liked. Was this a subtle hint from your relative that they hated you? I think here's a book why I hate kids.

The acerbic sense of humor on my mom's side of the family is probably part of that, and part of the reason why I appreciate WC. Fields so much. I'm fairly competent it as a relative giving it to me as a joke, And I had no idea though, because I would read those lines and they were I got once I was reading them, and I would really enjoy that book, but it always kind of flew above my head, like, oh, it makes sense that this guy doesn't get along with kids. That's kind of funny. In rewatching his films, you realize there's a lot of inappropriate humor in regard to his relations with women and his place in society as a white male.

Then you watch Kirby your enthusiasm, and you realize that's exact actually what Larry David is doing, and how important it is for us to see how shitty people can be. Turning that appropriately into a joke is why WC. Fields, for me, is completely brilliant. Probably why scholars have only barely touched his work as far as being critical or going back and editing it and for public consumption and stuff like that. The Dentist is a wildly inappropriate short everyone, and it had been edited.

That's the one that I know of that had gone through editing. I have a version of it. The Criterion Collection put out the original version of it. It's you know, it's inappropriate, but it's nothing like you haven't seen by today's standards, but back then it must have been like, oh, my goodness, he's pulling this woman's tooth out and she's straddling him and has her foot her foot in his pocket, and yeah, I mean it's just like, no innuendo is coming from him. He's just fed up, he's just trying to get this job done.

He hates her, and yet it's sort of a sexualized interaction. Well, it sounds brilliant when I think about you and I over the years and are sort of banter. I can see we've sort of been You and I over the years have sort of been Statler and Waldorf a little bit. I didn't like it. What do you have a kind of thing when looking at the world like you're you're looking at the world critically but also humorously.

And I feel like you and I have always understood each other, that a cerbic sense of humor makes sense for us and probably why we are such good friends to this day, because nothing should go without some sort of critique. In my opinion, Oh, I thought you were going to mention the inappropriate sexualized interaction. That's why I thought you were going with that. No, I'm not sure. No, I'm talking about it.

That's hilarious. No, that doesn't sound right. Wid tapping into that. Statler and Waldorf For me as a kid, I always appreciated Statler and Waldorf, though I didn't really I didn't couldn't really articulate why the fact that a family member gave me I never met a kid I like as a gift. It just goes to show that nothing should go without critique, nothing should be protected from humor.

So WC. Fields in my late twenties early thirties, I just dove deep into him. I watched everything. I'm fortunate I worked at a video store that had everything. I was able to just sort of ingest it all.

There are a few films that are better than others, as some that you could tell he was sort of getting tired at the end of his life, and maybe his alcoholism was getting the better of him. But I mean, he's making movies for decades, so every era has gems. There's always something brilliant there, and it's just a matter of time before people rediscover him. Now that I've mentioned it, it's going to enter the zeitgeist. There should be a reseurgence of interest and understanding like what he was making commentary on and how important that is in retrospect.

Yes, because our show has that much. I'm telling you, it has nothing to do with our listenership. It's just really it's like entering it into the air is like, that's basically it. We're just saying these words, and then suddenly I know that by the end of this month, something weird will happen, like the company that made those ventriloquist dolls will start rereleasing retro style ventriloquist dolls based on old timey movie stars. Something like that's going to happen, or maybe there'll be a new Mego.

WC. Fields the company that does and they're not Mego but Figures toy company. They do the three Stooges from different films in different outfits. They have quite a few series of Three Stooges figures. I've seen those, and I if Migo came out or any company that could release these came out with Mego style WC.

Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Lauren Hardy, our Gang, like any of those, I'd be a sucker for it. Our Gang was a were migos back in the day. I don't think they've reissued. I don't think anybody's reissued them in the modern era. But there were our gang migos.

They deserve a reissue. I want to stand Alfalfa next to W. C. Fields, next to Officer Big Mac and just take a picture of them in the yard, and that would make my millennium in regard to Alfalfa as being one of those people. He I mean, a lot of them continued on in movies, maybe not pass like the fifties, but I always get a little happy surprise when we watch It's a Wonderful Life and oh, Carl Switzer is in there, right, Yeah, I forgot about that as an older teenager.

Yeah, and get some lines and at that dance when the pool opens, he's there. And I don't remember when I realized that, but at some point I was like, man, that true looks like alfal Fall grown up. Did you ever watch the remake The Little Rascals Like New the Night. Had zero interest in that film when it came out. When I was working at the movie theater, that film had just hit, So when i'd go on my break, i'd sit in there sometimes and watch a couple minutes.

No, it's not good. There's no way the kids in that movie could have the natural charm of the originals. So it held my interest. I'm sure there's people who will argue with us on this, but I will say from the bits and pieces I have seen, not a great movie, that ain't it. No.

Yeah, I just watched a movie, probably on TCM, and I think it was before he was a bigger star and was the lead in movies. But I was like, Hey, who is that guy. I was like, oh, it's WC. Fields. So I have no idea what movie it was.

It was an early role and he was sort of just a side later. Yeah, he's one of the few of those old group of comedians that I actually like because of that acerbic humor. Yes, and it's not necessarily slapstick, and it's one hundred percent cerebral. It is all about the dialogue. There are some slapick slapstick moments, right of course, because it was I mean, that's kind of how he got his start in vaudeville.

I mean, chaplain got his start in vaudeville too. He got his start in vaudeville. WC. Fields juggling essentially and he was a really brilliant juggler, and so the slapstick is there. But once the silent film era was over and sound had hit the mainstream, he was all about that dialogue and the timing and the responses, the shitty things he would say under his breath that was so funny.

I mean, it's no wonder I didn't get it as a kid. As a young adult, I was like, whoa, this is like everything I want to see right now. He's great, And to this day he's oh, you know what? And I need to say this too. In rewatching the Marx Brothers.

Later on in life as well, I realized that that was happening with Grouchow, that Groucho was totally doing the WC. Fields thing too. Groucho had a lot more to say, and so the writing there is brilliant too. But if you're looking for cerebral, acerbic humor, not intellectual by any standards, but smart, Grouchow and WC. Fields is a master of that.

Groucho's great too. And I thought about the Marx Brothers. They deserve a whole other episode. And it's just like Buster Keaton does, because the Marx Brothers are brilliant to keep that on your list. It's there.

You're drunk. Yeah, you're crazy. Can I'll be shower tomorrow. You'll be crazy for the rest of your life. But this is a little bit of an outlier for this episode, but he kind of connects with the WC feel in sardonic humor in a way.

And this is one of those oddball things that I remembered as probably on our first episode. One of the things I jotted down while we were talking. Oh yeah, I remember that. You got to remember that that was a big deal as a kid. And that is Garfield.

Oh yeah, the not so Lovable Orange Cat. And I, well, let me give a little bit of history, because this is all new to me. I didn't really know much about his history. Just kind of exploded onto the scene when I was younger. So it was started in nineteen seventy eight, but goes back a couple of years before that because he appeared in a comic called John who you know is his human caretaker I guess we're lack of a better term, created by Jim Davis in nineteen seventy six.

It ran in local papers wherever he was from, somewhere in the Midwest. I think like a lot of those, and I'm trying to think of I was trying to think of another example of like a breakthrough character where that wasn't the original intent, and then you get feedback, Oh, you know, we really like that cap, and so that becomes the lead. So he went into syndication in seventy eight. But I don't think the Fresno Bee got him that early. That seems to me, in my personal history with comics or with this obsession, that seems a little early to me.

That would have been nine, and I feel like this happened at an age where I recognized that I was too old be into him this much. So I feel like I was at least in junior high. It could have been younger because of the books. And we'll get to the books in a minute. But as many kids did, I read the comics the funny pages as they're always called in movies and TV, pretty religiously as a kid.

I don't think I've looked at the comic section of a newspaper in twenty five years. Well, it's certainly not the same now. Once Calvin and Hobbes and Farside ended, I had no interest anymore. Oh, we got to do a whole episode on farside. Those are two that are on my list as well.

Yeah, whenever he first showed up, or whenever I first discovered him in the Fresno B I was immediately hooked. It was mainly about his character design, and then I slowly got into the humor of the strips, which was very sarcastic. Garfield is a sarcastic, sardonic character, a selfish character which can be funny and belittling to pretty much everyone around him. Hates everybody, kind of like WC. Fields.

That's right, that's perfect. I remember trying to trade sim trying to draw them on my own. Yep. So a lot of it was the character design. In nineteen eighty and again I don't think I was in on this from the beginning they started releasing Garfield books.

The interesting thing about those, and I didn't realize this until doing my research for this, because it seems like that's how all comic strip books are done these days, but they were the first to use a landscape format as opposed to a portrait style format, longer vertically than horizontally. That is due to Jim Davis. The creator of Garfield, saying, hey, why don't we do them this way? I would say I, and I think I still have them. I didn't go digging in the rafters.

I looked up there and just realized, all of the Christmas ornament boxes and all that stuff, we're in the way of my personal stuff. And I had no interest. Sorry, just for the episode. I thought about it for half a second and saw what I was looking at getting into and said, fuck it, I'm not trying to Just so I could say like exactly how many of the books I had, but I had a bunch of them, at least seven or so, could have been more because they released them twice a year, so there would be a release. The first one was released in September of eighty and then every year after that it was like March September or February August, so there were two every single year after that first one, and I bought a bunch of them.

Man, I don't know. I think it's the sarcastic humor that pulled me in and his design, but it's one of those things that at a certain point just absolutely fell away completely. I was done interested it. Probably. I mean, I read the comic pages for a good while, and I'm sure he's still it was at some point the most syndicated comic in all of history.

I doubt that's still the case, but at his apex, at his zenith, it was in more papers than any other comic, which is surprising because you know, the Peanuts were still around, right. I had a similar experience with it. It was I got real deep into it. I learned how to draw m I basically learned how to draw cartoon characters from him and Looney Tunes, and I bought a lot of those books too, And then, similar to you, it just done like one day. I don't know what it was, but one day it was just like, Okay, I'm not interested anymore.

But there was a good period of time there in the mid to late eighties. I guess for me it was late eighties where I was just like deep into it and loved Garfield. And then I'll say this real quick, but he came back. He came back into my life just about five years ago when I discovered Garfield Without Garfield, Yeah, I was gonna bring that up. I'll just say, if you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.

It is absolutely hilarious. It does remarkable things. It's so weird. Yeah, anyway, Yeah, I'm sure you have a lot to say about it. We'll come back to that in a minute.

Here, yea more about it. So it was Garfield and his owner or his human compatriot, John, and then Odi yep, the dog who got terrorized by Garfield. And Odie was the pet of John's roommate, Lyman, who disappeared at some point, like they do with things, you know, you know, like the Cunningham's original older son disappears from the show. Mark is referring to the show Happy Days. The same thing happens with comics and other media.

And the only other character that I really got into was Normal, who was sort of Garfield's foil. Yeah, if I remember correctly, was kind of dumb and like innocent, and Garfield just couldn't stand him. But he was, you know, incredibly cute. I don't know which books I had, I know I had a bunch, but here are the first ten titles, and you can kind of get the idea of what they were going for here. So the first one was Garfield at Large, then Garfield Gains weight, Garfield Bigger than Life, Garfield weighs in, Garfield takes the cake, Garfield eats his heart out, Garfield sits around the house, Garfield tips the scales, Garfield loses his feet, and Garfield makes it big.

And there are like forty of these now and then they also get anthologized in large volumes where you get the first three together. And the only other things that I remember having beside the books when I was younger was a plush, and they made different sizes of this plush, but they were all basically the same design. I'm not sure which size I had. I think I had the seven inch or maybe the one above that, but there were like seven, eight, ten, twelve inch plushes, so I had that. And that was styled after his earlier form where he still walked around on all fours, because at some point he goes by pedal, as does Odi, which I'm not really that big a fan of.

I don't think I really recognize that as a kid when it happened, but having those early books and seeing his evolution of design where he's really big at the beginning and more crudely drawn like a lot of these things, and we've talked about it with the mascots and other stuff where everything gets rounded, yes, and cute and sort of loses some detail because he used to have squinty eyes and sort of heavier jowls. And I remember this almost job of the Hut esque in a way, and then just gets streamlined and round and adorable or whatever. So I had a plush and then I had a pencil topper, and I think I still have a pencil topper somewhere in this house, and I couldn't find it in the spot that I last remember him being in.

So I have a feeling I passed him on to Cleo at some point, and God knows where that is now, because if you were to take a peek into her room, they would just be absolutely horrified because it's a disaster area. That's how it goes. The other day, not the other day. About a month ago, I was at Target and guess what was on the shelf in the neck a section but a garfield with such a cup hands and feet that was so huge for us in the late eighties. Almost every other car on the field had that garfield attached the window.

I think that's when I was like, I'm done, man, I can't it's just like ubiquitous now on every fucking car. Can't. I can't be able to anymore. He's gotten too popular. I can't.

I was an original. I liked him back. I could see you, I could see you doing that. Yeah, and then my interest was peaked in him again, as you mentioned with the Garfield minus Garfield strips, which I came to because of the Internet and followed that account on Facebook. However, many years ago it popped up and if anybody doesn't know what that is, it's this guy, and I have no idea who it is.

Garfield minus Garfield was created by Dan Walsh. Took the Garfield strips and removed Garfield, and so it's mainly just Jim. Yeah, Mark meant John Garfield's human companion. Jim is Garfield's creator. It becomes like an existential nightmare.

It's so good. If you read like a bunch of them in a row. The speech bubbles or thought bubbles are still there, but it's basically Jim interacting with either nobody or some more of the minor characters. His thoughts and or speech still kind of makes sense and a horrifically yeah bleak bleak way. It's brilliant, And then they released a book, and I think the credit still applies to Jim Davis as far as he's the author of the book.

Whoever, this guy is just came up with an absolutely brilliant I'm laughing right now. The laughter is genuine. I can't recall an exact strip from the Garfield without Garfield, but I have the book. I'm laughing only because that's exactly was my reaction. So the first time I saw it, it was out loud laughter.

And every time I revisit the book, which I have, by the way somewhere, and it came out in the exact same shape, like four by six or three by five or whatever, probably more four by six. I'm laughing just at the thought of it. Yeah, I've never encountered a more brilliant way to appropriate something and turn it into a surprisingly hilarious version of itself. It is brilliant. It is.

It's incredibly again and losing the word that I want. Just by doing that one thing, it turns it into a whole other thing that you wouldn't think would work as well as it does. And it just works wonderfully because of the original interaction of those two Yeah, I don't even know how to explain it, but it just it works great. I have a word for it. And it's sad.

And part of what makes it so funny is how sad it. I mean, it really is John just talking to himself. It's sad, and that's part of what makes it so funny. It's just just so weird and sad, which he is anyway. With Garfield in the strip, and I think that's it.

Hits that how bleak John's life is. It puts the pin on that. Oh it's so good. I'm gonna get that book after our episode today and read it. The only other thing I wanted to mention about Garfield is that I remember the specials, and I don't know if there was ever an actual series.

I remember watching the specials whenever they came out and not really liking how he was voiced. Yeah, it makes sense, it's actually that droll kind of delivery, but I think I imagined him differently in my head. And then the movies with Bill Murray I've never even watched, and again I think it's a matter of I've never seen them, but I've seen the house they bought, and it's beautiful. Thing with him as well, like he probably made a shit ton of money for doing the voice of Garfield in those movies, and they paid for rounds of golf. I did watch about the first ten minutes of the first Garfield movie.

I had a similar reaction to the specials too, which is it didn't quite work in that way. There's a unique quality to the comic strips up until the very end of those that the movies and the specials didn't have the format works. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I wanted to like the Garfield movie because Bill Murray, you know, it's like I pretty much like almost everything he's done. Saying that I could only get about ten minutes in is saying a lot, and I haven't even attempted.

I think I've caught bits and pieces on cable, but no interest in sitting down for an hour and a half. I'm glad you brought up Garfield because it's something that I hadn't thought about a lot for a long time until I discovered Garfield without Garfield, and then I thought about it a lot. Then I stopped thinking about it. So it's good to hear that somebody else went through that journey too. Garfield was certainly a phenomenon.

Yeah, massive, very popular, and I know the books probably made that dude a ton of money. Oh yeah, good on him. We watched an episode of Eat the Cat. Do you remember Eat the Cat from the nineties, the early nineties. It is a very short lived Ariella remembered it my wife as so.

We watched an episode last night with the girls and it kind of holds up a little bit. It's sort of in this like early nineties crazy weird cartoon, sort of like Tiny Tuns or whatever, the Beetlejuice cartoon in that style, surreal humor. Eath the Cat wouldn't have existed without Garfield. I feel like Heathcliff wouldn't existed without Garfield. Some people might argue with me on that one, maybe vice versa.

I'm pretty sure Heathcliff predates Garfield. Oh we'll find out. Yeah, well, I'll put that in as a correction. Who came first, Heathcliff or Garfield. We will answer that question right now.

Heathcliff was created before Garfield. Garfield made cats funny. Hey, it's why we got our first cat. To be honest with you, Oh I got so. We were dog people before you know, I mean my parents.

I can't really say my sister I had much to say about it, but I believe that me getting so into Garfield was the impetus for us getting our first cat. And we haven't been cat people ever since. Cats are great, and cats are sarcastic little assholes, so they really are. It makes sense rings true, absolutely, and without them we are just in an existential crisis, as we saw revealed, without gard talking to ourselves about our bleak existence. Oh God, I gotta reone reread that, Okay, Ronnie, So let's pretend that this is a surprise for people.

What is your local place for this episode? Oh Man? Without consulting with you, I chose this place that was pretty iconic for me as a kid here in town in Fresno, called Pizza and Pipes. I did little research and found out that it was a solely California thing. Oh were there others?

Yeah? There were other There was one Santa Clara and Sacramento, a few other places. The guy who started at his name's Bill Brewery started in nineteen sixty two. There were franchises, but I don't believe it left California. I think there were only like six locations, five or six locations.

Right before this episode started, I said, so what did you pick? My subconscious is like, would you pick as a local restaurant? Because I had already picked a restaurant, even though it doesn't have to be a local restaurant. And you laugh because you're like, would you say, how do you know as a restaurant or something like why would it? Why would you say?

Yeah, said restaurant And then what did you say to me? I said it was pizza and pipes. I was like, holy shit, that is so weird. And I told you that I picked that. It hadn't been on my list until recently because I don't usually drive down Shields, but we did a couple weeks ago.

I mentioned the Clovis antique mall or stores in reference to what we talked about last time. To get out to Clovis from where I live, you take one of the freeways here through town. You go down Shields to get there, and Shields and First is where the pizza in Pipes was And it was in a real funky I always thought of it in my head as a kid as a castle. Yeah. It was a two story turreted building.

Wasn't it like shake shingles all around? Yes, essentially it was a box. You get inside and is a box with two different levels, but on the outside they had this whole facade. Yeah, almost like a turret thing with shingles, and it was pretty epic if you're a kid looking at us. Across the street was Jemco, which was like a target kind of store, and now that story is a target.

That same building where Pizza and Pipes is located is still there, And that's what you were saying when you were driving down Shields and you looked over to your left and saw it. It's now a Mitchell con Plethas shop and I love those. So haven't been to that location yet. For many years, it was closed up after Pizza and Pipes disappeared. But this was one of those places where you would have your birthday party.

Yep. Really the only reason. I'm sure people went there for other reasons. The only times I ever remember going was for somebody's party. I may have had one there myself, I kind of don't think so.

I almost always did parties at home or went to a movie, but I know I went to tons of birthday parties there. Yeah, and they had pizza, which I don't recall being all that good. I don't remember the pizza quality at all. It was more about the atmosphere for me. It was filled with arcade games and there was a pipe organ, gigantic pipe organ.

That's where you get pizza and pipes, and the pipes were pipe organ pipes. And somebody would sit there, probably wondering to himself the whole time, how did I get in this messactly? It was always just a normal dude too, Like I don't believe there was a costume attached. It was just a person that they hired to come and sit down and play. It almost looked like a customer could be playing it.

The few times that I had been in there, toward the end, no one was playing it. When I was very young, people would be playing the organ. And then when I was just a little bit older, getting closer to when it would close up, the organs just be sitting there. Probably cost too much to keep it up, probably, And I did read in my research. I did read at some of the locations simply replaced the keyboard with like a Yamaha electric keyboard, rather than maintaining the pipe organ itself.

They just replaced it with a synthesizer of some sort. Now did they show I just had this thought, and I don't even know if I'm making this up, but did they show like silent movies? Okay, so I know exactly where you're going with this. I had to dig into my brain. There was a pizza hut on Blackstone near Fresno City College.

They would play our Gang Little Rascals three Stooges. I don't recall seeing short old timey films at pizza and pipes, but I do recall them showing at that particular pizza hut. Yeah. See, I wouldn't have that memory though, because I never went to a pizza hut as a kid. So maybe I'm actually combining memories.

I couldn't say, but I know my misremembering wouldn't be because of that, because I've never been to a pizza head. You're not missing out on much. This is a future local place. But we went to a particular pizza place. Oh yeah, every single time we wanted pizza when I was a kid.

That's on my list. We're not going to mention it now, we won't because I have a lot to say about that too. I'm pretty sure we're talking about someplace today. I was going to talk about Chuck E Cheese, but then I thought, that's sort of like McDonald's. Yeah, that's not local.

That's a whole other deal. It's not local. Also, I was obsessed with that as far as animatronics, like, animatronics was a huge thing for me. That's a topic for another episode exactly. Well, here help me with this, and we're doing this right now.

You didn't know I was going to bring this up. I have this weird memory, and it could have been just a party thing, like somebody had their birthday party at Pizza in Pipes, But I have a weird memory of a costumed hipop otamus, like a person in a hippopotamus costume. I dug through all the images online of Pizza and Pipes. There are no characters attached to it. But I have a very strong memory of a purplish hippopotamus character costume.

And if you don't remember that, then it must have been just sort of like someone that they hired for someone's birthday that just happened to be there. Well, not necessarily, because I don't remember a whole bunch about it. Other than at having a pipe organ going to birthdays there, and the only other thing that it really had going for it were arcade games. Yeah, I believe on the second level. And I was never a big arcade game player, never a big video game player, because I sucked at them and it cost money to play and it felt like a waste of money to me.

It is, so I usually just watched people play. That was the only really other draw because like I said, I think the pizza was all that great. Any who, Yeah, pizza and pipes. I had no idea. I didn't do any research because I was just going off of the birthday party aspect of it.

It being one of those And there is another one of those places that was a franchise, but I sort of consider local that we'll probably get to at some point. That was in Figure Village. That was the other birthday place that people went to a long I'll mention it after the episode, but it's wondering about that one. I guess we didn't have very many options as kids and friends noo for birthday locals. I can say right now though I've never been to a Chuck e Cheese Oh oh oh man, So you miss the era.

I mean if you go to a Chuck E Cheese now, our youngest we had a birthday party there for her years ago, and it's not the same. Chuck E Cheese has changed substantially. When I was a kid, it was like a dark, interesting and strange place with rooms that had animatronics in it. There was no video element aside from the video games in the arcade. Now it's all sort of digital screen.

Don't give away too much. Oh yeah, yeah, you're getting me off on going off on a tangent da, But we'll go back to pizza and pipes. Just to get people an idea of the size of the organ. That's what she said. It was a Wurlitzer theater organ.

So if you've ever seen one of those two story tall theater organs, that's exactly what it was. And it was epic as a kid going in there and looking up at this thing. The person playing was on a tall pedestal, probably about six feet above the ground. Not pedestal, but stage. The pipes would extend all the way to the ceiling.

And when that guy would be up there playing it. I say guy because I only saw dudes playing it. When that person would go up there and play. It would be boomingly loud, like the decorations were kind of like a restaurant. I don't know how else you would say it, like it reminded me a little bit of like old spaghetti factory.

Yeah. There were old timey pictures on the wall, pictures on the wall, and could have been local, could have been popular, volve stuff I don't know, could have been And then it was a giant organ. It was a very relaxed but novelty experience, hearkening back. It started in sixty two, but they were definitely a harkening back to an earlier era. I mean, just the thought of a pipe organ, which the only real experience for me was in a church.

Yeah, because some churches had big pipe organs. Yeah, this was really the only other place to experience that. Yep, for sure. It didn't have any silent theaters in town still with pipe organ and some places, do you know, some places have theaters like that that have existed for decades and they still have their pipe organs, but not Frisno. I have very fond memories of pizza pipes to this day.

I'll never know about that hippopotamus, whether it was just a dream, or if it was, I actually saw somebody in the costume. It's it's part of my memory. I think it's strange that we came up with the same thing. That's just hilarious. Where can people find you outside of Cambridge and was Shan, Well, it's kind of an exciting time for my YouTube channel.

I just reached the level of monetization on my Sclevator YouTube channels, which has allowed me to expand some of the things there. I created a little shop over there for Sclevator and toy Frenzy stuff and maybe you and I can talk about incorporating some Cambridge and was Sean things there. But it just happened this week, so I'm excited. If it pays for a sandwich here and there, I'll be stoked. And you know, Instagram is another place where you can find me under the moniker Sclevator.

If you're interested in my art and my writing, you can find me on Instagram under Ronald Zuryggian Underscore Projects. That's it for me. How about you? Where can people find you? People can find me at my other show Wake Up Heavy Recollections of Horror.

On social media, you can find me at wake Up Heavy on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and letterbox, linktree dot com slash wake Up Heavy. Last thing I didn't mention that I should mention. Folks are Instagram enthusiasts. You can find Cambridge and with Sean on Instagram. Go become our friend over there already.

Until next time, have a great month and a nice summer, and hopefully where you live it doesn't get too hot and there aren't any wildfires. Yeah, we'll see you. Then next time it'll probably be blazing hot here and we won't have our windows open. That's exactly what's going to happen until next time. Thanks for listening, Bye bye.

Cambridge After Seawan is a weirding Way media podcast